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May 23, 2017

   I've been working with Yocto embedded Linux lately for a work project.  Building can be a slow process and I managed to compile the project on a Pentium D machine in just over 24 hours.  Needing some more horsepower to compile my good friend Pluvius let us a 12 thread workstation.  I was able to reduce the compile time to under 4 hours.  It also gave me the chance to try running Proxmox virtualization management.  This system went on quickly and while I have a number of things tweak I had a functional quite fast.  This setup is going to work nice for future work projects and I may write more about it as time goes on.

May 20, 2017

   With rain yesterday and forecast to continue for the next several days I took my iron horse to the shop for a tune-up.  I'm pretty rough on my bike and the bike shops sees a lot of me.  It will be nice to have gears that shift when they are supposed to again.

May 19, 2017

   Biked to work with a low chance of rain forecast for the afternoon.  Well, 20% means your odds are 1 in 5.  Not so much rain as a drizzle, but enough water and cool enough temperatures it was irritating. 
   Pictured is the sushi group the other night.

May 18, 2017

Happy Birthday Zen

   Since I couldn't ride into work yesterday I decided to ride today.  My speeds were lower from the difficult riding conditions yesterday but I should be able to get in 3 rides to work this week.
   Birthday shout out to Zen.

May 17, 2017

   I wanted to ride into work today.  However it was forecast to rain about the time I would be leaving work.  When it didn't rain I had a look at the radar and it was unlikely to start.  So I cycled out in some of the strongest winds I've ever had to bike in order to do my Martinsville-Waunakee loop.  This is typically just under a two hour trip and burns around 1,500 Calories.  I was holding speeds far too high for the effort most of the first two legs of the trip.  When I reached Waunakee for the third and finial leg of the trip I had not yet reached 1,000 Calories.  However, I knew the south leg was going to take some effort.  This was an understatement.  I am not sure I managed to hit 10 MPH for more then a minute along County Q.  There were periods of strong guests I struggled just to hold 5 MPH.  By far the slowest 5 mile stretch I've ever cycled.  The 28 mile trip took 2 hours and 14 minutes, and burned 1,627 Calories.  I made this same trip last month and it took 2 hours and 9 minutes but burned 1,502 Calories.  However, all the effort came in the last 45 minutes of the trip and I don't have numbers to compare against. It is good to have difficult riding conditions from time to time so one can better appreciate the clear riding conditions.

May 15, 2017

Welcome the Emerald Dragon

This morning Zen swapped DrQue.net’s DNS and e-mail server computer from its temporary home on the Pi Dragon to its new home on the Emerald Dragon. The Pi Dragon quickly took the helm after the death of the Micro Dragon in mid March.

DNS worked without any issues, as did the Apache redirect for the root of DrQue.net. E-mail gave us a little trouble. Seems that with this install of Ubuntu the mail directory was moved from /var/mail to ~/mail. Once I got that worked out e-mail seemed to be fully functional. The other problem was with fail2ban, intrusion prevention software that watches log file and firewalls IP addresses attempting to gain access to the server. I couldn’t figure out exactly what the program was complaining about and ended up just reinstalling the default configuration. That seemed to do the trick and very quickly I watched several IP addresses get banned.

The Emerald Dragon has significantly more CPU power than the Micro Dragon and draws a fraction of the power. With zero moving parts the Emerald Dragon should also never have to worry about issues like hard drive failure that ultimately took out the Micro Dragon. However, it will have some big shoes to fill. The Micro Dragon has had continuous run times of more than a year straight without a reboot, several runs at more than 200 days, and most runs being more than 100 days in a row. Perhaps a year from now we can evaluate how solid the Emerald Dragon really is. For now the future promising: A fanless, solid-state, battery backed system running the a long-term stable OS. I look forward to what the Emerald Dragon can do.

May 14, 2017

37 inches of hair

37 inches of hair

   Steve and Pluvius helped me with this shot.  I used a tape measure placed at the base of my queue to measure the length of my hair.  The very end measures 37" (94 cm) in length—a little over 3 feet or just shy of 1 meter.  I knew my hair was long, but I didn't know it was quite that long yet.